The Nixon-Obama Debates by Jonathan Chait

[babylonsister]

The Nixon-Obama Debates by Jonathan Chait
Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy. Oh, wait-- actually, you are.
Post Date Wednesday, November 05, 2008


In 1960, John F. Kennedy attacked the incumbent Republican administration for allowing the Soviet Union to open up a "missile gap" over the United States. The gap turned out not to exist. But it put the young, inexperienced Massachusetts senator on the political offensive and positioned him to the right of his more experienced Republican foe on the central foreign policy question of the day.

Barack Obama has pulled off the same feat in this election, with an unintentional assist from John McCain. Since September 11, 2001, the threat of Al Qaeda and Islamic radicalism has dominated the foreign policy debate, and, on this question, Republicans have dominated Democrats, just as they did through much of the cold war. Obama may be winning primarily due to the economy and the unpopularity of President Bush, but the more surprising and historically significant thing about this election is that he has managed to stake out the more hawkish ground on fighting Al Qaeda.

How did the GOP lose its most potent and unassailable political asset? It goes back to July 2007, when The New York Times reported that, in 2005, the Bush administration had aborted a mission to capture senior Al Qaeda members in Pakistan, to the frustration of many intelligence officials and members of the Special Operations Forces. A month later, Obama gave a foreign policy speech in which he lambasted the administration for a "terrible mistake to fail to act." Obama warned, "If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will."

Obama's threat received little attention until he had established himself as the all-but-inevitable Democratic nominee. McCain, seeking to define his opponent as a foreign policy naif, began warning that America could not "risk the confused leadership of an inexperienced candidate who once suggested bombing our ally, Pakistan." In reality, Obama had advocated not bombs but special forces operations. McCain saw it is an opportunity to cast Obama as a total ignoramus--the fool doesn't even know Pakistan is one of the good guys!

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